Rebecca Swift, who has died aged 53 of cancer, believed that anyone who writes and wishes to be edited and advised constructively and professionally should be given that opportunity. To this end, in 1996 she founded The Literary Consultancy (TLC) with Hannah Griffiths. It was the first of its kind – a manuscript assessment agency offering detailed editorial feedback to anyone writing in English anywhere in the world. Set up in Becky’s north London flat on a capital sum of £600, TLC never borrowed another penny.

From 1989 to 1995, Becky had been a junior editor at Virago Press. At that time, the “slush pile” – that mountain of unsolicited manuscripts – was one of the first casualties of the editorial department: publishers no longer had the resources to read unsolicited manuscripts, which were returned to the writer with a standard note.

Becky test-ran the idea of TLC while she was at Virago, unknown to her bosses, writing her first report under an assumed name and even charging a small fee. Her enduring belief in the link between the act of writing and the therapeutic process led her to an MA in psychoanalytic studies at the Tavistock Clinic in 1999. Her thesis Are You Reading Me? explored the relationship between unpublished writers and readers in the publishing industry. In her words: “TLC was born, perhaps to mop up some of that ‘toxicity’ that lay between production of a work and the apparently negligent ‘reality’ of the publishing world.” Through TLC she tirelessly sought to fill that gap.

On panels and platforms at literary festivals Becky talked about the work of TLC, and promoted her vision for it. It grew into a service that offered a mentoring scheme as well as a free reads programme aimed at low-income and marginalised writers and backed by Arts Council funding.

The Free Word Centre in Clerkenwell, central London, where TLC was a founding resident from 2009 onwards, became a crucible for the literary events and annual conferences that Becky programmed. The first, Writing in a Digital Age (2012), brought together writers, technology experts, literary agents, publishers and digital media gurus for the first time to discuss an increasingly complex publishing landscape which included the growing phenomenon of “indie” or self-publishing.

From her father, Becky inherited her love of music and musicals. She was never far from a song - at her last public appearance in November 2016 celebrating TLC’s 20th birthday, she picked up her guitar, accompanied by the jazz trio who had been performing all evening, and sang Suzanne in memory of Leonard Cohen, who had died that day.

From Camden School for Girls, she went on a scholarship to study English at New College, Oxford (1983-86). She returned to London and took her first job in publishing, at Lokamaya Press, which published translations from Urdu and Hindi, before joining Virago.

The day Doris Lessing came to lunch

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Her publications include Letters from Margaret: The Fascinating Story of Two Babies Swapped at Birth (1992), a correspondence between George Bernard Shaw and Margaret Wheeler, and Imagining Characters (1995), a book of conversations between AS Byatt and the psychoanalyst Ignês Sodré. Her biography of Emily Dickinson was published in 2011 by Hesperus in its Poetic Lives series.

Becky’s own poems were published in numerous anthologies and she had been putting together a manuscript of poems which she hoped to publish. She leaves a vast body of writing in the form of diaries she wrote daily for much of her life, fulfilling her need for introspection through this unflinching therapeutic ritual.

Becky experienced three periods of clinical depression, which informed her commitment to bettering mental health provision. This she pursued as a trustee of the Maya Centre, a charity based in north London providing free counselling to vulnerable women.

She will be remembered by friends, family and colleagues for her wit, warmth and wonderful storytelling. Noisy, confident and pioneering, she was curious about people, always wanting to push the boundaries in life and work. She has left publishing in a better place than where she found it.

Becky leaves her partner of many years, Helen Cosis Brown, her parents, her stepfather, her brothers, Adam Swift, a political philosopher, and Joe Swift, a garden designer and TV presenter, and her two nieces and two nephews.

•Rebecca Margaret Swift, literary consultant and writer, born 10 January 1964; died 18 April 2017